Nature’s 10: ROBERT-JAN SMITS: Open-access leader

"The architect of this year’s bold push to get rid of paywalls in science publishing says he got his ideas from an unlikely source: the publishers themselves.

In March, Robert-Jan Smits was tasked by the European Union’s research commissioner, Carlos Moedas, with a special one-year mission: to get more research papers published outside journal paywalls, and fast. A veteran science-policy bureaucrat, Smits decided to go to the source: he asked big publishers how he could do it. They told him that if the organizations that pay for research insisted the findings had to be published openly, journals would have to adapt.

So that’s what Smits set out to persuade research funders to do — in a plan launched in September that has sent shock waves through science publishing...."